


The Force Has a Plan for Us

by ivory_leigh



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Love at First Sight, M/M, Major Illness, One Night Fic, Present Tense, SpiritAssassin Week 2017, Young Baze, Young Chirrut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-25
Updated: 2017-04-25
Packaged: 2018-10-23 19:24:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10725639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivory_leigh/pseuds/ivory_leigh
Summary: Spiritassassin Week prompt 1: First impressions.Baze falls a little in love with Chirrut the very first time they meet.





	The Force Has a Plan for Us

**Author's Note:**

> Heads up, this fic was written in one absurdly long, caffeine-fueled sitting. I promised I was going to submit something every day during the Spiritassassin week EVEN THOUGH I KNEW I HAD FINALS, so here we are.

Baze falls a little in love with Chirrut the very first time they meet.

How could he not? Blue eyes and black hair, charming, witty, bitingly sarcastic. They meet in the marketplace, Chirrut with a basket over one arm and Baze with his begging bowl, and Chirrut stops to talk to him, drops an apple into his empty hands. They are eleven, almost twelve—old enough to know what love is, to feel it, to want it, and young enough to expect that it won’t come to them for another twenty years.

Baze repeats his mantra as Chirrut walks away, tucks his robes beneath him and tries to find his breathing again. The Force is with me and I’m one with the Force. The Force is with me and I’m one with the Force. His pulse goes on hammering in his throat.

He meets Chirrut the next day, and the next and the next, all the way through the rainy season and into the summer beyond. Chirrut brings him something different every time: a block of cheese, a loaf of bread, half of his mother’s sunberry pie. Baze knows this charity means nothing but that doesn’t stop the way his heart tips sideways with every new offering, grilled fish and fresh carrots dropped into his bowl. He confesses once that he misses the the honey cakes from his hometown and Chirrut comes back the next day with three of them, dirty and penniless and absolutely glad.

He lies awake at night in the temple and thinks, remembers, touches the place on his hand where Chirrut’s fingers had brushed against him. He wonders what it means that his chest tightens every time he thinks about him, that scrawny little farmer boy with a faith as big as the sky. He wants and is afraid to want, imagines their lips brushing together the way he’s seen adults do before. Baze tries to convince himself that it doesn’t mean anything, the presents, the touches. Baze will go on to serve the temple and Chirrut will go on to run a farm, and maybe they will see each other but they can’t, they’ll never—

Chirrut comes to see him every day, until their little moon loops around their little star and the rainy season comes back again, Chirrut twelve now and growing broader. Baze eats well and sleeps little, gets up early for fear of missing him. He meditates, ruminates, keeps his thoughts of kissing in the sanctity of his bed. Chirrut will leave one day, he reminds himself. Chirrut has a family, a duty. Everything is temporary. Attachment is not an advantage.

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Nothing prepares him for the day that Chirrut doesn’t meet him at the market stall.

It’s autumn, the winds cold and the harvest over, and Baze spends the entire day huddled under his waxed cloak, waiting. He waits past the dinner bells and the nighttime prayers, waits in the frosty darkness until he can’t feel his hands anymore and then heads inside, alone. It hurts in a way he wasn’t prepared for, to climb into bed without the memory of a new touch or a tender smile, and it isn’t just the hunger that makes his stomach ache. He feels like he’s dying. He doesn’t know why.

Chirrut doesn’t come the next day or the day after, and Baze goes hungry, goes lonely, keeps to himself under the dark fabric of his cloak. He’s been so used to food that having nothing is like eating knives, sharp and piercing and that doesn’t explain the pain in his chest that sits there, just as heavy the next morning as it’d been the night before. Chirrut was not bound to him, Baze thinks when he’s curled up in bed with his tear-stained face against the pillow. Attachment is forbidden. Possession is forbidden. He had known this day would come.

That doesn’t make it hurt any less. That doesn’t make his tears go away.

It’s three weeks later when he sees Chirrut again, and the breath goes out of him when realizes who it is lying fevered and unconscious in the back of a farmer’s cart. His stomach turns in on itself. The heart that he’d thought had broken stops cold in his chest.

“Please,” the man says, and his voice is foreign and familiar and he has Chirrut’s dusty black hair. “Please, my son is sick. Please.”

“We can’t pay you,” the woman tells them, and her eyes are blue, blue, blue. “I’m sorry, we have no money but we—we have food, we could trade. Please, your healers, can they—”

“We will take him,” one of the elders says, and another guardian, a woman, tries to rouse him from the cart.  “What is his name?”

“Chirrut,” the man says, accent gone soft around the word. “Chirrut Imwe.”   
Baze feels himself moving although he can’t remember telling his feet to walk. He pushes the elder aside, gently, gently, and slides his hands under Chirrut’s narrow frame. He’s lost weight, Baze notices, smaller, more fragile than he’d been before, and when he lifts him it’s so easy and so frightening that he almost lays him back down again. The elder takes hold of Chirrut’s legs and Baze thinks about everything as they carry him into the temple, thinks about the day they’d met and the suppers they’d shared and the way his heart was still shivering in his throat.

All is as the Force wills it, he thinks, and then, desperately, Let him live. I don’t care if the Force wills it, just, please, just let him be okay.

They lay him down in the medical wing and Baze pulls Chirrut’s tunic off, rinses the salt and sand off his skin and lays cold compresses across his brow. The healers murmur amongst themselves, discussing tinctures and potions, and beneath the swell of their voices Baze begins to pray. He sits on the floor in his meditation pose and presses his forehead hard against Chirrut’s clammy palm, feels the blood beneath it, the heartbeat. The Force is with us and we are one with the Force. The Force is with us and we are one with the Force. The Force is with us—

Chirrut doesn’t open his eyes for three days. For three days Baze watches and meditates, anxious, frightened, waiting for something to change. Chirrut sweats and he shivers and he cries out, sometimes singing words in a language Baze does not understand, and the healers stand by and nod and murmur to each other, dark shadows in a darkened room. All is as the Force wills it, they tell him, and Baze tries to pray a little harder.

The Force is with us and we are one with the Force. The Force is with us and we are one with the Force. The Force is with us and we are one with the Force.

When Chirrut wakes up, Baze is the first person he sees.

Or he should be, he should be, but Chirrut’s eyes are wide and blinking and just a little more blue than they were before, looking right past him to the darkness beyond. “Chirrut?” Baze says, because he’s forgotten all the other words he’s ever known, and Chirrut blinks at him and looks around, eyes flickering everywhere except his face.

“Baze?” he asks, slowly. “Why can’t I… see you?” And Baze learns the most excruciating type of grief right then, feels his knees buckle under the weight of it, the realization that his prayers hadn’t been enough.

He should have believed a little harder, he should have worked a little more, he should have slept in the cot beside Chirrut instead of leaving for his own bed at night. Maybe if he hadn’t wanted him so much, maybe if he hadn’t been so jealous, so attached, maybe if he hadn’t fallen asleep wondering what it would be like to hold him around the waist and forget to let go…

Baze reaches out and pulls Chirrut’s hand into his, lays his friend’s clammy palm against the ridge of his forehead, the bridge of his nose. “I’m here,” he says, and Chirrut’s skin brushes against his lips, sends his heart skittering back into his throat again. “I’m right here.”

“I… “ Chirrut’s face scrunches up, confusion, first, and then terror, blinks back the sudden tears that spring to his newly-blinded eyes. “I can’t see!”

“I’m not leaving,” Baze says, because he can think of nothing else. Chirrut’s hand spasms against him and he must be able to feel the regret that roils in Baze’s stomach, the hot tears that roll down his face. “I’m not leaving. I’m here, I’m here and I’m going to stay here, alright? I promise. I promise. I’ll stay with you until you’re better, until you can see again.”

Chirrut starts to cry and Baze leans down to hug him, wet cheek to wet cheek, Chirrut’s hands twining through his hair. Baze loves him in that moment more than he’s loved anything else, loves the vulnerability of him and the strength of him, the soft skin and solid bone that shakes beneath his hands. He doesn’t know how to reconcile the fact that the Force has failed them and yet the Force is all around them, surrounding them, embracing them. He feels connected and abandoned all at once.

“I’m here,” he says again, more loudly, and people are beginning to crowd into the doorway, footsteps rushing toward them to see what is wrong. Nothing is wrong. Everything is wrong. “I promise I won’t leave you all alone.”

Chirrut heals, and his healing is measured in hours and days and warm nights spent with Baze in the next bed, telling all the stories of the jedi he had learned when he was young. Chirrut’s eyes never work again and that’s okay, that has to be okay—all will be as the Force wills it, and sometimes the Force wills terrible things. But nothing prepares Baze for the day that Chirrut turns to him, hair cropped and face washed, dressed in the robes of the guardian initiate, and says, “You know, you did say you’d stay with me until I could see.”

Baze grunts a little and smiles, shuffles over to offer his arm. “Yeah. I’m already starting to regret it.”

“Don’t worry too much.” Chirrut takes his arm and they begin walking, slowly, a staff held aloft in Chirrut’s other hand. “You never really had a choice.”  
  
“I didn’t?”

“Of course not,” Chirrut tells him. “The Force had this planned all along.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
